


A Different Angle

by phoebesmum



Category: Sports Night
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-21
Updated: 2009-11-21
Packaged: 2017-10-03 11:54:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoebesmum/pseuds/phoebesmum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>New interns make Dan feel his age, and more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Different Angle

**Author's Note:**

> Written March 2006, from the prompt words 'sunscreen, insomnia, patchouli'.

It's that time of year; high summer, when the new interns turn up for work, every intake younger than the last, or so it seems. Boys in their media-studies uniforms of baggy jeans with dress shirts and skinny ties, hair slicked and spiked with gel; girls in tiny dresses and big, clumpy boots, long hair shimmering down their backs. Almost all of them sport piercings and tattoos, their conformist, by-the-book rebellion earnest, touchingly naive. Every one of them is thin and tanned and pretty, the air around them sharp with the scent of sunscreen, clove cigarettes, patchouli.

He avoids them. Casey jokes that it's to resist temptation. It's not. It's to forestall the stir of memory.

These children. He was like them, once. Almost exactly like them (he let the piercing heal over; the tattoo is on his hip, where few people will ever see it). He left that world behind, a long, long time ago; doesn't regret it.

Only, the scent of patchouli takes him back, and suddenly he's 18 years old again. And that's one year he never wants to relive.

He comes into work the next day, sluggish and drowsy, eyes shadowed. A bad night, he tells Dana, when she voices concern. And then the next night's bad, and the next again, troubled and sleepless. A week passes; Dana orders him to see a doctor. She doles out pills with professional unconcern, and he flushes them away.

Better insomnia than the nightmares.

*** 


End file.
